Modern networks involve multiple switches, servers, and other networking components, including without limitation networking line interfaces. All of these components tend to draw significant amounts of power. Along those lines, a conventional networking line interface may consist of separately packaged components, such as for example optical modules, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (“FPGAs”) with serializer-deserializer (“SERDES”) capabilities, and Dynamic Random Access Memory (“DRAM”) modules. Such optical modules may include a laser-based optical integration, such as vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser-based (“VCSEL-based”) optical integration for example. Such optical modules may too involve multiple chips, such as for example a receiver optical chip and a transmitter optical chip, as well as corresponding electrical driver and receiver chips. Accordingly, all of these separately package components draw power and consume a significant number of pins. Such pin count can be excessive leading to constraining bandwidth. Moreover, a laser generally has a limited thermal budget, and thus is a thermal bottleneck for integration with logic.
Hence, it would be desirable and useful to provide a networking line interface that overcomes one or more of the above-described limitations.